Is there anyway to install blender on ubuntu without root access?
Just download the latest Blender for Linux from blender.org/download (currently 2.78c for Linux 64bit), unpack the tar.bz2 file

tar xjf blender-2.78c-linux-glibc219-x86_64.tar.bz2


and run the "blender" executable from inside the unpacked folder

cd blender-2.78c-linux-glibc219-x86_64
./blender &lt;options&gt;